Truths And Consequences

On a KPCC-FM talk show this morning, someone said that politics is a lot like the courtroom, where neither prosecution nor defense usually concedes the validity of the other's narrative. The problem with the analogy is that in court, both sides are working with the same facts. Not so in politics, where facts are almost infinitely malleable. If an attorney shows a jury a document with 43 vital words removed, as the Republicans showed the public this week in Tampa to set up their "We Built That" theme, her opponent will swiftly point out what's missing. For evidentiary assessments and challenges in politics, we rely first on journalists and then the opposition.

These days you need a scorecard to keep track of the political agendas of media personalities and outlets. I like bloggers like Andrew Sullivan who aggregate a wide range of responses. He does so here for Rep. Paul Ryan's speech last night, in which he called on Barack Obama to be accountable for his record while failing to be accountable for his own contributions to the deficit and debt as well as his role in torpedoing Simpson-Bowles.

Sullivan calls it a list of Ryan's lies. A legal friend tells me he doesn't like to hear that word applied to misleading political discourse. He says that it's usually not a lie to leave something out. Plus some of Obama's critics argue that the GOP's tape gap exposed the underlying truth of Obama's skepticism about capitalism.

Then there's the opposition as truth teller, which can also be a thin reed. As the KPCC observer said, the prosecution rests tonight, and the defense has its turn next week. In a comment on an earlier post, my St. John's brother Barry Fernelius wrote:

If I were putting together the Democratic convention, I'd feature a segment that first shows the edited version of Obama's remarks, followed by a complete version. Then, I'd hammer home the central message. "The point is that when we succeed, we succeed because of our individual initiative, but also because we do things together."

An operative has probably suggested something exactly along those lines around a conference table at Obama HQ. A great idea as long as it doesn't sound too defensive. Maybe there's a Romney clip Democrats can selectively edit to trigger people's inchoate concerns about his foreign policy naivete: My opponent has completely failed...to attack...Russia...using... Ann's horse Rafalca! Overall we can anticipate a Democratic convention with a comparable mendacity quotient, since that's the way the game is being played. The candidate who opts out loses.

This gladiatorial model has its advantages. Leaders who fight hard and even ruthlessly can come in handy in a dangerous world. And like politics, citizenship isn't beanball. Voters who don't pay attention to candidates' falsehoods deserve the leaders they get.

Besides, the political free market has a way of weeding out those whose narratives aren't authentic or don't resonate with the nation's needs. That's one of the reasons I'm curious about how well Mitt Romney will scour, as Abraham Lincoln (as quoted by Richard Nixon) would say. Is he a conservative who waxed moderate to thrive politically in Massachusetts or a moderate who veered to the right to get nominated for president? Or maybe he has no fixed convictions beyond faith, family, profit, and winning, which would make him the first post-ideological, technocratic president. So far, it's a question that's even defied the fact checkers.

We Edited That

Hendrik Hertzberg is obviously right that the Republicans' Tuesday convention theme, "We Built That," was based on a grossly deceptive edit of Barack Obama's July speech at a firehouse in Virginia. Say what you will about the president, but the idea that he would tell entrepreneurs that they didn't build their businesses is ridiculous. It would be evidence of dementia, like standing in the rain and saying it's not raining. Obama was making a point about how society trains, encourages, and often subsidizes job creators. That "unbelievable American system," he said, in a rousing tribute to American exceptionalism, "you didn't build that."

You could say the comment resonates because people have a gut feeling, thanks to lackluster job and GDP growth, that Obama doesn't understand how the economy works -- but the comment doesn't resonate unless you change it.

You could say, as Andrew Sullivan has, that Obama deserves the drubbing because he spoke carelessly -- but if it was really that bad, then the mendacious edits wouldn't be necessary. Real gaffes, such as Richard Nixon saying he wasn't a crook or Gerald Ford that Poland wasn't under Soviet domination, don't require deliberate erasures.

You could say that Obama was giving too much weight to communitarianism. Free education, tax breaks, and infrastructure won't create a job unless an individual or group of individuals adds vision and energy and risks capital. It did sound like Obama was scolding entrepreneurs for thinking they're all that, which seems churlish when we've got 20 million out of work. Give us 5% growth, and keep your discourses on political philosophy to yourself.

But that's not what Republicans said all day yesterday. They said, falsely, that Obama told business builders they didn't build anything. Their visceral, uncontainable contempt for Obama simmered behind the sentimental faux documentaries. Besides, they know that their base constituency will believe anything -- he was born in Kenya, he's a socialist, he wants to tear down and diminish the United States, he believes only government can create jobs. I'll leave out of the equation whether it's harmful to the country to alter a president's public policy comments and pummel him for what he didn't say as a means of seizing power. I imagine it's been done before, though an example doesn't spring to mind. I'll even leave aside that the U.S. would probably be better off if many Republicans hadn't given in to these passions in the first months of his presidency and dedicated themselves to defeating rather than working with him. I just keep remembering Karl Rove telling Republicans to treat Obama with respect since they can't win without millions of his 2008 voters. I wonder how these tactics are playing with them?

Simpson-Bowled Over

With pulls revealing a shift to Mitt Romney on economic and fiscal issues, Andrew Sullivan says Barack Obama might lose unless he embraces Simpson-Bowles.

Bloggers Rush In

Owing to the slow pace of hometown reporting on the controversy, it remains unclear whether Saddleback Church's Pastor Rick Warren snubbed Barack Obama and Mitt Romney or they snubbed him.

So speculation abounds. Naomi Schaefer Riley thinks the president's miffed at Warren, who's being, well, pastoral and giving Obama some cover:

One...suspects that Mr. Obama's refusal to participate has much to do with Mr. Warren himself, who publicly opposed the [free birth control] mandate. In February the pastor tweeted: "I'm not a Catholic, but I stand in 100% solidarity with my brothers & sisters to practice their belief against govt pressure."

So why is Mr. Warren covering for the president by suggesting that nixing the forum was Mr. Warren's idea?

Andrew Sullivan comes right out and calls Warren a liar for saying the cancellation was his idea and speculates about why Romney would never have risked sitting down with the world's most famous Christan evangelical:

[T]he idea that Mitt Romney would ever have agreed to sit down for fifty minutes to discuss the fact that he believes God was once a human being, that humans can become gods as well, that Israelite tribes once inhabited the Americas and that polygamy exists in the after-life ... well, it was never going to happen, was it?

Sally Forth

Sally Ride's sister, Bear, described Sally's partner of 27 years, Tam O'Shaughnessy, as a member of the family and added:

The pancreatic cancer community is going to be absolutely thrilled that there's now this advocate that they didn't know about. And I hope the GLBT community feels the same. I hope it makes it easier for kids growing up gay that they know that another one of their heroes was like them.

Andrew Sullivan thinks the astronaut, who was fiercely protective of her privacy, should've spoken up sooner:

Her achievements as a woman and as a scientist and as an astronaut and as a brilliant, principled investigator of NASA's screw-ups will always stand, and vastly outshine any flaws. But the truth remains: she had a chance to expand people's horizons and young lesbians' hope and self-esteem, and she chose not to.

In fairness to Dr. Ride, she also kept her illness secret from family and friends for 17 months. But she made no secret of one of the focal points of her life after NASA, the empowerment of young women. From her New York Times obit this morning:

In 2003, Dr. Ride told The Times that stereotypes still persisted about girls and science and math — for example the idea that girls had less ability or interest in those subjects, or would be unpopular if they excelled in them. She thought peer pressure, especially in middle school, began driving girls away from the sciences, so she continued to set up science programs all over the country meant to appeal to girls — science festivals, science camps, science clubs — to help them find mentors, role models and one another.

Times reporter Denise Grady put her reference to Ride's partner near the end of the story, where survivors' names usually go. One assumes it was her and O'Shaughnessy's wish to come out that way, elegantly, simply, as though it were no big deal, which, someday soon, it won't be. Could she have done more to spotlight being a pioneer for lesbians as well as women? Reading her obit, I felt this great American had done enough for her country. Godspeed, Sally Ride!

Faith And Minds Alive

What a wonderful time to be a Christian, and an Episcopalian. Above is a fascinating hour-long conversation between Andrew Sullivan and Ross Douthat, author of Bad Religion: How We Became a Nation of Heretics. Then my Nixon buddy Paul Matulic pointed out this Slate exchange between Douthat and William Saletan as well as the fact that the New York Times turned to an Episcopal priest, Randall Balmer, to review Douthat's book:

Although Douthat’s grasp of American religious history is sometimes tenuous — he misdates the Second Great Awakening, mistakes Puritans for Pilgrims and erroneously traces the disaffection of American Catholics to the Second Vatican Council rather than the papal encyclical “Humanae Vitae” — there is much to commend his argument. Yes, the indexes of religious adherence are down, and the quality of religious discourse in America has diminished since the 1950s, in part because of the preference for therapy over theology. Theological illiteracy is appalling; many theologians, like academics generally, prefer to speak to one another rather than engage the public.

But the glass-is-half-full approach, to borrow from the famous Peace Corps ad of this era, looks rather different. I’m not sure that the enervation of religion as institution since the 1950s is entirely a bad thing; institutions, in my experience, are remarkably poor vessels for piety. An alternative reading of the liberal “accommodationists” Douthat so reviles is that they have enough confidence in the relevance and integrity of the faith to confront, however imperfectly, such fraught issues as women’s ordination and homosexuality rather than allow them to fester as they have for centuries. I suspect, moreover, that Douthat has overestimated the influence of intellectual trends like the Jesus Seminar. The thinkers he quotes are important, but I would also recommend the lesser-known work of writers like Roger Olson, Jean Sulivan, Doug Frank, Miroslav Volf and David James Duncan as evidence of the vitality of Christian thinking; they may occasionally poke provocatively at the edges of orthodoxy, but most do so from well within its frame. Finally, the fact that we are having this conversation at all (much less in the pages of this newspaper) is testament to the enduring relevance of faith in what sociologists long ago predicted would be a secular society.

Sinking Heart

Andrew Sullivan, though a supporter of Barack Obama, isn't pleased with either choice today:

[T]he promise of Obama...was delusional, not so much because he didn't try or have the ability, but because the other side immediately decided that this epochal moment for the country, the first black president, was not a time to compromise and resolve some deep long-standing issues, specifically on taxation and spending. What might have been an integrating, reforming moment evaporated with zero Republican House votes on a desperately needed stimulus in the worst recession since the 1930s.

And so my heart sinks as I see Obama drifting to the left, offering the silly Buffett Rule instead of serious tax reform, and Romney tacks to the W-Cheney right, promising tax cuts, defense increases and drastic debt reduction, without providing any clue as to how this can be afforded.

The View From Washington

I snapped this photo on Holy Tuesday from a St. John's Middle School classroom as seventh graders and I labored through 1 Peter. I offered it to Andrew Sullivan for his "View From Your Window" feature at "The Dish," which ran it today. A photo from Kathy's and my idyll in Twentynine Palms in March 2009 also made the cut.

The One And Only Two-State Solution

Scholar and blogger Peter Beinart has ignited a controversy by calling for a boycott of goods produced in West Bank settlements. On his behalf, Andrew Sullivan called on Beinart's critics to say what they'd do instead to promote the peace process. Beinart's proposition:

Today, the Israeli government—with the active consent of the organized American Jewish community—provides myriad subsidies for Jews to leave democratic Israel to settle across the green line. Regardless of your opinion about the Palestinian willingness to make a two state deal today, such policies are deeply self-defeating since they make a two-state solution harder ever. A settlement boycott could help to rebalance the scales. If critics disagree—and yet still profess a belief in the two state solution—then they should offer their own alternatives for how to stop the settlement growth that threatens Israel’s democratic future. I’m all ears.

My reply, e-mailed to Sullivan (I'll only check every five minutes or so to see if he uses it):

No fair. When Beinart writes, "Regardless of your opinion about the Palestinian willingness to make a two state deal today," he takes the solution off the table. Neither the U.S. president nor op-ed writers can stop settlement expansion. Only the Palestinians can, by accepting the best available territorial offer as soon as possible (and, I'm afraid, agree to punt on dividing Jerusalem). While we may be appalled by the settlement movement, it isn't a conspiracy to undermine the peace process. It's a function of Israel's complex social, theological, and political dynamics. That means that each time Palestinians have said no -- 2000, 2008, 2010, and 2012, in Jordan -- the inevitable result was or will be settlement expansion and a smaller, less coherent Palestine. It will keep happening until the PNA figures out that they're the ones, beside Israel, with the power. As a matter of fact, the Beinart initiative just provides more encouragement for the mistaken belief that outside leverage will get Palestinians a better deal. If they're going to have a state, if they really want one, it's time for them to say yes.

Sullivan's Obama-First Policy?

Bloggers Jeffrey Goldberg and Andrew Sullivan profess to remain friends, though their public argument over Israel and the Palestinians has become so heated that it's hard to imagine their finding much common ground to have a beer over. Today Goldberg appears to take it up a notch by accusing Sullivan of personalizing the issue to an alarming extent:

I remember when Andrew, of course, characterized Palestinians as devils and thought Israelis wore halos, but this was before, as he told me over lunch one day a couple of years ago, he realized that Netanyahu, in his opinion, was standing in the way of President Obama's destiny. Once Netanyahu got in the way, Andrew said, he was finished defending Israel.

Cops And Bloggers

For two years Jeffrey Goldberg has been warning readers about the likelihood of Israel attacking Iran. Writing during a Middle East visit last week, Goldberg speculated that Benyamin Netanyahu may have been bluffing the whole time in order to get the U.S. to toughen its position. Andrew Sullivan, perhaps forgetting Winston Churchill's maneuvers before the U.S. entry into World War II, is shocked, just shocked that Israel would leverage and manipulate its generous ally. For his part, Goldberg admires the Washington-Jerusalem two-step:

[Obama and Netanyahu] they have accomplished something extraordinary together over the past two years. The sanctions Obama has placed on Iran are some of the toughest ever placed on any country. Even some hardliners now believe that they just might force a change in Iran’s nuclear calculus. And how has Obama convinced the world that these sanctions are necessary? By pointing to Netanyahu and saying, “If you don’t cooperate with me on sanctions, this guy is going to blow up the Middle East.”

Obama’s good-cop routine is then aided immeasurably by the world’s willingness to believe that Netanyahu is the bad cop.

No one fully understands the dynamic between Obama and Netanyahu, apart from the men themselves. And no one, maybe not even their closest advisers, knows what they said to each other when they met alone March 5 in the White House. I recognize the suggestion that the two men are deliberately tag-teaming Iran is a bit much to swallow, and I recognize, too, that believing Netanyahu never intends to attack Iran by himself is dangerous.

When word got around the Episconixonian newsroom about Goldberg's use of that particular law enforcement metaphor, our voices were raised as one proclaiming "Holy Guacamole!" Back on Feb. 22, I wrote:

Whether taking the threat of an Israeli or U.S. attack seriously would lead to war or the negotiating table remains an open question. It occurs to me that President Obama and Prime Minister Netanyahu, without having set out to do so, have fallen into a good cop, bad cop dynamic that is making the threat of an Israeli attack seem more imminent than it perhaps is -- which, again, may help draw Teheran into a meaningful conversation about how to avoid war, which would be by not developing a nuclear weapon. George W. Bush pulled off something similar with Libya.

Striving For Harmony Between Peoples

Andrew Sullivan seconds this tribute by a British politician to Archbishop of Canterbury Rowan Williams, who announced his resignation today:

In the last three years I have grown to appreciate more and more the fine qualities of Archbishop Rowan - his kindness, his sharp intellect, his dedication to striving for harmony between peoples, especially within the Christian family, his courage and his friendship.

He's shown here during a 2009 visit to the Episcopal Church of the Messiah in Santa Ana, California.

Third-Place Mitt

Andrew Sullivan on Mitt Romney's three third-place finishes tonight:

[T]he odds of a brokered convention rise slightly; Romney remains unable to get any serious momentum; and Santorum keeps winning the vote of those earning under $50k. The evangelical vote against Romney remains solid, unchanging, resilient. The dynamic of the race has not altered; it has complicated marginally in Santorum's direction.

Single-Source Grist And Mill

Andrew Sullivan, Sarah Palin's most relentless critic, was inveighed upon by friends to watch the superb HBO movie "Game Change," which amply demonstrates, if anyone had any doubt, that she was an abysmal choice as John McCain's running mate. He was especially pleased to find grist for the Trig Palin birther mill. He writes, "[T]he movie shows the press actually asking questions about it -- something that never came through in the mainstream media at the time."

Praised by McCain aide Steve Schmidt for its accuracy, "Game Change" indeed reminds us that the Trig story had a profound impact on the messaging and trajectory of the McCain-Palin campaign. What I'm not sure Sullivan fully grasps is that the main reason reporters pestered her with questions about Trig's birth was that Sullivan himself had republished lies about it on his highly influential blog without checking the facts first, an irresponsible act for which he's yet to apologize.

Bibi And Obama

Only 19% of Israelis support an attack against Iran without U.S. support. With it, the number is 42%. According to Andrew Sullivan, that's why Benyamin Netanyahu is coming to Washington with President Obama in his sights:

Netanyahu desperately needs US cover for an attack; and is furious he cannot simply push them around as he was once wont to do. Nonetheless, he has a united Republican front in Romney, Santorum and Gingrich, funded by Greater Israel fanatics like Sheldon Adelson, and in desperate need of a way to ignite the Christianist base. He will have a chunk of Democrats as well - and next week's AIPAC conference to beat the drums for war. He also has the potential to send oil to $7 a gallon by election day - and tip Europe and the world into both a new terror crisis and a deeper, longer recession. All of this is leverage to get Obama to do something of enormous risk to the Middle East, the West and the wider world, and launch a war that America, rather than Israel, would have to own.

St. Santorum For President

Andrew Sullivan has an epiphany: The Republican Party should take its most logical and natural candidate, Rick Santorum, to its bosom and suffer and perhaps learn from the likely electoral consequences.

This goes against Sullivan's view that parties should always nominate their most responsible candidates, since we live in an unpredictable world where either could be elected despite what the polls say in February or October. A Santorum loss in November might lead to a GOP reformation. His winning would risk a reckless war with Iran that could kill a quarter-million people.

But back to Sullivan's epiphany:

[F]or the past decade, the Republican elites and base have... insisted on a politics that is mediated by theology.

They are the ones who have insisted that religious argument has an integral role in public discourse; that there is a "war on Christmas" and now all religion; they are the ones who have campaigned against gay marriage as un-Biblical or in violation of a "natural law" barely updated from the 13th century; they are the ones raging against a two-state solution in Israel-Palestine because God bequeathed it all to the Jewish people; they are those who directed the federal government to involve itself in an end-of-life decision already resolved by state law; they are those who have made criminalization of abortion a litmus test for Republican candidates for a generation, and who want to give women an invasive ultrasound before allowing them to exercise what has now been a constitutional right for decades.

And when an intelligent, sincere candidate emerges who has actually walked the walk on these issues, and refused to back down on them, and overcomes a massive financial and organizational disadvantage to become the national leader in the polls, he's suddenly far too extreme.

Is Santorum unelectable in a general election? Yep. The current polling says Rick loses to Obama by 6.3 percent. But Mitt loses to him by 5.1 percent. How big an argument do you want over 1.2 percent?

I despise what the GOP has become. But it is what it is. And Santorum is its logical leader. Let this party stand up and be counted.

They Focus-Grouped That. Looks Too Weird.

Roman Catholic Andrew Sullivan on the Ash Wednesday GOP debate:

Neither of the Catholics has ash on their forehead.

Remind me to tell you about the time I imposed ashes on Sean Hannity.

Standing Pat

Andrew Sullivan stuck to his guns after readers excoriated him for criticizing MSNBC's firing of Pat Buchanan. Late on Tuesday, a reader sent him a vignette about Buchanan from Nixon-McGovern days and concluded:

What is it we need more of in our discourse? More intellectual backbone? Less sanctimony? Where the hell should I start? I’m not sure, but silencing Buchanan isn’t a step in the right direction.

The New Paternalism

Andrew Sullivan sticks up for Nixon speechwriter, presidential candidate, and pundit Pat Buchanan, fired this week by MSNBC:

Sixteen years ago, when I came out as HIV-positive and quit [The New Republic's] editorship, Buchanan, who had sparred relentlessly in public with me over gay equality, wrote me a personal hand-written note. He wrote he was saddened by what he heard - which was then regarded as an imminent death sentence - and wanted to say how he would pray that I would survive, if only so we could continue to argue and fight and debate for many more years. He was one of only two Washingtonians who did such a thing. I was moved beyond words. But he knew I loved a good argument as well. Over a gulf of ideological and philosophical difference, we could debate reasonably.

He's a complicated man and I will not defend for a second his views on many things. But he is also a compassionate and decent man in private and an honest intellectual in public. It says everything about the polarization of our discourse and the evolution of cable news into rival sources of propaganda that this ornery figure, still churning out ideas and books while others his age are well in retirement, is now banished.

For shame. Another step backward from real debate on cable "news".

Buchanan is indeed gracious in person, as I can attest from his and Shelley's periodic visits to the Nixon library when I was director. I haven't read the book that angered MSNBC, but I'm well aware of the broad outlines of his sometimes bizarre thinking -- diversity is hurting the United States, the U.S. shouldn't have have entered World War II, it would be better if we could return to the social and cultural conditions he remembers from his 1950s boyhood in Washington, D.C. He's also accused of antisemitism and excessively harsh criticism of Israel's allies in the U.S., although on this question his often-derided views about Jewish influence on our media and politics don't differ dramatically from those of Palestinians' advocates in progressive circles.

It's also important to remember his opposition to the Iraq war, a classic if lonely expression of conservative isolationism. Although in her memoirs Condi Rice makes a respectable case for the Bush administration's process in the run-up to war in 2003, I'm still not sure Buchanan was wrong.

I don't defend his more noxious views, which Howard Kurtz wrote had become too "radioactive" for a cable network that Kurtz says has moved sharply left, as it evidently grasps for Fox News' intellectual near-irrelevancy. It's funny Kurtz used that word. In the early 1980s I was part of a Nixon team reading through White House files to flag documents we felt should be kept secret on privacy and other grounds. The same adjective occurred to us as we read some of Buchanan's pugnacious prose on the antiwar movement and class politics, foundational expressions of what later became known as the culture wars. As I recall, I wrote a letter that Nixon signed and sent to Buchanan saying jokingly that he needn't worry, because we'd buried his memos in lead-lined drums under the National Archives. Of course Nixon also got memos from Daniel Patrick Moynihan, Ray Price, and other more moderate advisers and aides. He usually wanted to hear all perspectives on difficult questions before he made up his mind. On other occasions, such as when Buchanan was writing for Vice President Spiro Agnew, Nixon let Pat's right-wing freak flag fly. Here Buchanan seems to be quoting Agnew reading a script by Buchanan.

I also concur with Sullivan that one needn't agree with Buchanan to oppose his firing. Chris Matthews, who expressed regret about his bosses' move, isn't an apologist for racism, antisemitism, or homophobia. He's an advocate for vigorous debate as a hallmark of a healthy democracy. The man who fired Buchanan, Phil Griffin, exhibits more authoritarian impulses, believing that his views "should [not] be part of the national dialog." That reminds me of another example of the annoying new paternalism among our cultural and political elites: Rick Santorum saying that contraception is "not okay" and that as president he'd try to limit its availability. What happened to media tycoons and politicians who gave us credit for thinking for ourselves?

Sanity As A Political Virtue: Pro And Con

As Rick Santorum campaigns against women's reproductive rights in the wake of last week's health insurance imbroglio, Andrew Sullivan credits Barack Obama without another successful jujitsu move:

Santorum could win the primary on an issue that guarantees him a landslide loss in the fall. The Christianists and theocons have over-reached - and the far right in the Congress is playing along too, further entrenching the view that the GOP is anti-contraception. Obama meanwhile seems like the sane compromiser who cares about women voters.

If sanity also prevailed in GOP politics, Santorum's desire to bring about pre-1920 conditions in the realm of gender equity could be easily blunted by Mitt Romney. As Sullivan points out, Romney's health plan in Massachusetts also required Roman Catholic institutions to provide free contraception to employees who wanted it. Santorum, of course, can use that against Romney in the upcoming GOP primaries. By the same token, you might think that for once Romney would consider making a virtue of his record by saying that it's antithetical to conservatism for Santorum to say that as president he'd want to put an end to the use of birth control. As a matter of fact, Romney might say that Santorum is evincing tendencies that are borderline despotic. That would be the kind of bold move David Brooks called for on Feb. 10. If Romney is too scared of the right to take advantage of his opportunity (one might also say responsibility) on an issue of such profound concern to millions of Americans, you have to wonder about the efficacy of a system in which one party rewards sanity and the other relentlessly punishes it.